One look at Martina Mazzei would reveal several things: a small, pale-skinned, young woman with dark curly hair, who uses her infectious laugh and magnetic charm to draw people in. She has no accent or obvious features that would set her apart as a foreigner. However, there is much more to her story than what the eye first sees. She is a bilingual, first-generation, dual citizen.
Marti’s parents grew up together in a small Italian town by the sea. After her father completed his undergraduate studies in Naples, he earned a Fulbright scholarship to complete graduate school at Stanford University in California on a student visa. Her mother moved to California to be with him, and it wasn’t too long before they were married and had two daughters. Shortly after Marti was born in California, the family moved back to Italy, where she lived for five years in Milan, and then two and half years in Florence.
“I went to an international school growing up,” said Marti. “Since my dad had this dream of going back to America someday, he wanted good education for his daughters.” For years, Marti would speak Italian at home and go to school taught exclusively in English. “One of my sister’s teachers was Australian,” she remembers. “For a whole year she started having an Australian accent when she would speak! Isn’t that crazy?”
When asked if she ever felt the need to specify that she had American citizenship, she said, “A lot of kids at the school were American, so it didn’t matter — they were more American than me. And I was Italian, also.”
After a baby is born in America, they automatically have citizenship in the United States. One famous case of this is with the popular actress Diane Guerrero. Her parents were deported back to Colombia when she was young. However, because she was born in the United States, she was a legal citizen and did not get deported along with her family. Marti, being born in California, was automatically a citizen of the United States even though her parents were still immigrants.
For her Italian citizenship, the rules are different. The citizenship of Marti’s parents was simply carried over to her, even though she was not born in Italy. “If I have a kid and they can prove that I’m Italian, and they have an address in Italy — which obviously my parents did because they lived there — and they can prove that connection, you can get citizenship,” she said.
Life was good in Italy for a young Marti. But then, when she was around eight years old, her family of four packed up and moved to Minnetonka, Minnesota.
“I don’t remember if we moved when I turned eight or nine…but it was two weeks before my birthday that we moved. So I remember that my ‘birthday party’ was literally mom, dad, and sister going with me to the Mall of America,” she laughed.
When it came to balancing the two different cultures of her world, Marti found that much of her home life — her family, house, cooking, etc., — was all (and still is) in Italian. Especially when she speaks to her grandparents or goes home to her parent’s house for a long weekend.
“I feel like the part of me that’s with you right now is 100% American. But when I go home for a long weekend, if I don’t see any of my friends, I don’t speak English once. And I feel like that part of me is 100% Italian. So that kind of distinction is hard because I feel like I’m not growing up anymore in Italy.”
That did lead to some issues as she was going through high school, where everything she did outside of her home was in English. While translating most of the vocabulary came naturally to Marti, certain subjects, such as math or science, were not part of the lexicon that she had learned for Italian. When her mother would ask her what she had gone over in school that day, Marti sometimes found it hard to communicate with her effectively. She also discussed the disconnect between her own self, her teenage cousins and friends in Italy. Whenever she goes back to visit and does not know the slang or things they do for fun, she says it can be awkward.
“I’m like an Italian daughter and an American teen,” she exclaimed. “Half of me will always be the Italian daughter and cousin and grandkid because my family is all still in Italy. But I feel like if they weren’t all still in Italy, it’d be so much more difficult to keep that part of myself.” So to her, what truly makes Italy a part of her home are the people she loves that still live there.
To someone who has never experienced growing up as an immigrant child, that thought can be incredibly daunting to wrestle with. And it was a feeling that even Marti’s parents couldn’t entirely relate to, since they had grown up in Italy. She remembers looking at the parents of her friends and wishing that she didn’t have to explain things to her own parents in the way that her friends didn’t have to.
“For a long time, I hated that my parents weren’t American…especially the beginning of high school. It was so stupid, but I would go home and feel like my mom just didn’t understand what it was like to be an American. I felt like I didn’t want to be whatever she wanted me to be — like I couldn’t be Italian here…that wouldn’t be right.”
It’s a feeling she says a lot of immigrant children go through. She pointed out how embarrassing it can be if one’s culture doesn’t fit in with “American Standards” and how she just wanted her own parents to be more normal. But that has since changed. “Now I look at everyone else’s parents and I am so thankful for mine and for what they went through.”
And she jokes that she did firmly inherit one very Italian quality from her mother. Whenever the two of them cook, they tend to use their hands to demonstrate every detail they are discussing. Marti laughed and said, “We always make fun of her for it and then I go and do the same thing!”
As a dual citizen, she has two passports, which can be helpful when traveling. “Every time I go to Italy, I leave the US with my American passport. And then as soon as I’m in the European Union, I just go to that line because it’s always shorter and they don’t really care because you’re in the EU,” she said. On her way back from Italy, she will leave with her Italian passport and enter into America with her United States passports.
But while Marti was born into her status, it was much harder for her parents to achieve the same position. She explained that her parents had to hold a visa for five years before applying for green cards. If the person applying for a green card does not have someone in the United States sponsoring their application, it is a simple lottery draw to see who gets accepted. After those were obtained, it was another five years of waiting before they could apply for citizenship.
After ten long years of anticipating, tax-paying, and careful documentation, Marti’s parents were finally both approved to be official United States citizens. When she got the news, Marti was actually studying abroad in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. “That’s why I cried at karaoke,” she laughed, recalling the very moment she found out.
Normally, when conversations revolve around immigrant children, Americans do not immediately picture a white Italian girl. It means that navigating the space of an “immigrant” is not always something that Marti is comfortable with.
“No one ever believes me when I saw I’m a first generation American. Because I’m white! And I look like I’m from Minnesota!” She went on to say, “I’m pale and dark haired. No one assumes that I’m going to have that perspective.”
However, she understands that aside from looking different, she has also had a different immigrant experience. “A lot of the time I feel like my parents had it so easy,” she said. While it was a long, grueling process for her parents to apply, she acknowledges that along the way, her father had a well-paying job and her family was upper-middle class, white and paid their taxes. Along the same line, Western European visas are much easier to obtain and navigate, she said. So while her own parents’ journey was a long and arduous one, she acknowledges that comparatively, they could have had a much more difficult time. Often, when people talk about immigrants, she feels like she cannot, or should not say anything. “We’re the easy immigrants from Europe. No one is going to say anything racist to me or my parents…we don’t have to face that kind of discrimination.”
She humorously brought up how she felt like no one would ever call her an immigrant in the first place, saying, “I live in suburban Minnesota, ya know?!” But she did go on to emphasize that immigrants are cool, and to always be nice to one’s immigrant friends — no matter where they’re coming from. “People always try to look at my skin color and diminish that part of me, and it’s like…I am still an immigrant.”
However, she does recall the first time someone ever questioned her about the status of her legality. Last summer, her mother and her had been attending a local play. Before the production started, the two were conversing together in Italian. Suddenly, the man in front of them turned around and asked what language they were speaking. When Marti’s mother proudly answered that it was Italian, he bluntly asked if they were legal or not.
While Marti’s mother was unfazed and launched into the story of her citizenship application, Marti found herself sitting in shock. So much so, that when the man began to ask another question, she had to ask him not talk to them anymore. She remembers thinking, “What if we weren’t legal? What if my mom was like, ‘No, we actually came illegally from Canada! Scooted all the way through the woods!’ would he have called ICE in the middle of the theatre? It was just crazy!” She remarked on how people think they have a right to ask things such as that, and how absurd that seems to her.
As far as her Italian side, Marti does sometimes feel like she is not a ‘good Italian’. Whenever she visits and her grammar is off, or she doesn’t communicate a sentence correctly, she feels like the, “Token immigrant child that leaves the country and forgets the culture and the language.” To her, verb conjugations for conditional verbs are the hardest, since she never had to learn them in her English-speaking school. And, to her, not having that intimacy with words in the same way that she has with English has meant that she can sometimes feel as though she’s left on the outside.
The Italian language also has formal words, which are used to be polite with a person older than whoever is speaking. Those forms have different verbs and are conjugated differently, which does not come naturally to Marti, since all of the adults in her life are those she would not need the polite form for. “I don’t use this formal version to talk to my grandpa,” she laughed.
As far as raising her own bilingual kids someday, it is something that she frequently thinks about. First of all, she worries about if she finds an American man and he does not wish to learn Italian. Her grandparents, who do not speak English, and her mother, who will not want to speak English when she is older, would want to be able to communicate with her future husband someday. Marti herself would want to be able to fully share her culture him. Then when it comes to children, she jokingly agonized, “I can’t even conjugate verbs! My kids are going to be screwed!” It would be an incredible amount of work for her to raise young children in a country where Italian is not widely spoken. Still, it is a goal she says she thinks about often, and would like to try for.
All of this might beg the question: does she feel closer to one side of herself over the other? When life is almost categorized into ‘the Italian parts’ and ‘the American parts’, is it something that can be balanced?
When Marti is at Loyola, she only people she knows that speak Italian are two professors and her friend Anthony. “When I’m here, unless I’m FaceTiming my mom or thinking about my grandparents and calling them, it doesn’t even cross my mind and I feel like I’m American,” she said. But once she is at home, she describes it almost as a switch in her head that flips back and forth. “I’m sure I could do both,” she mused. “Like when my cousin comes to visit Chicago. We’ll speak Italian when we’re together but English when we’re with my friends.”
And all of this almost feels like a decision that immigrant children believe they have to make, but not one that actually needs to be made. After all, both countries are a part of Marti. So at the end of the day, why should she have to make that choice?
“I’m just me,” she remarked.
And that’s the bottom line. She has always been herself. A person might look at an immigrant and think, ‘this is their life here, and that is their life over there…the two are separate’. But it is the same person with the same experiences, joys, struggles, desires, and dreams. Both sides of their life and experiences and culture are brought into whatever aspect of their life they are living.
“When I first moved to the US I loved writing and thought I was obviously going to become a writer. So I wrote this story about me moving that was so funny, and I think I still have it on my computer. But at the end I wrote, ‘I am ready for the world, and the world is ready for me.’ And honestly, what a sophisticated mindset for an eight year old!”
When asked if that was still true for her, Martina Mazzei simply responded, “You know what? Absolutely.”